What If Ida B. Wells Depended on Facebook?

"Zuckerberg is free to suppress. He’s not a journalist; he’s the head of a for-profit corporation with a track record of mendacity and billions of private dollars at stake." (Photo: Legal Loop)

If Ida B. Wells had depended on Facebook, would we ever have had a National Lynching Memorial?

Two stories collided in my head this week. One of which was the opening of the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama—this country’s first major effort to confront the vast scope of the racial-terror lynchings that ravaged the Black community under a pervasive, prevailing culture of white supremacy. It is the first because, until now, that same majority culture of white supremacy hasn’t wanted to look.

At the memorial, a special place is set aside for Ida B. Wells, the crusading journalist who forced Americans to pay attention to these murders. Over a lifetime made shorter by repeated attacks, she documented and publicized the killings, collecting names, dates and descriptions.

She wrote editorials for various newspapers, but her longest running outlet was her own, the Memphis Free Speech and Headlight, which she edited and published until it was burned to the ground by her critics. And this is where the opening of the memorial intersects with another important story from this week.

Would Wells’s Free Speech ever have made it into my news feed on Facebook? I doubt it, because Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced May 1st in a meeting with media executives that his company had started ranking news organizations by trust.

News sources that score higher will be promoted, while those with lower scores will be suppressed.

As he put it, “You’re not going to be able to bridge common ground in society if people don’t have a common set of facts.”

To determine trustworthiness, the company plans to survey its two billion users about the sources with which they’re most familiar and best recognize.

American democracy has not advanced thanks to the mainstream media, but rather thanks to reporters on a mission and with the means to tell the uncomfortable, unfamiliar, uncommon truth.

However, by that standard, we’d never have had Tom Paine, Ida Tarbell or Ida B. Wells. We’d never have had a revolution, broken up the robber-baron monopoly corporations, or heard enough about the lynchings to have anything resembling a memorial—or even, probably, to make them stop.

We’d certainly have gone off misinformed into a misbegotten set of wars without end against nameless, nationless wrong-doers called terrorists…

You get my point.

From Paine to Wells, it has always been media at the margins—not the center—that has brought critical issues to a boil so that bigger, "recognized" media could inhale the steam. American democracy has not advanced thanks to the mainstream media, but rather thanks to reporters on a mission and with the means to tell the uncomfortable, unfamiliar, uncommon truth.

After Ida B. Wells published a column on May 21, 1892 denouncing “the old threadbare lie” that lynching was used to “protect white womanhood,” a white mob marched to her office in Memphis, destroyed her presses and left a warning that they would kill her if she tried to publish her newspaper again.

That lie was the most heard, most accepted, most familiar, trusted, conventional, common fact. It has taken the nation a century to wise up. If we want to preserve American democracy, we should learn from the past. We don't have that long, and we have no reason to repeat history.

Zuckerberg is free to suppress. He’s not a journalist; he’s the head of a for-profit corporation with a track record of mendacity and billions of private dollars at stake. He's not deluded, but we are if we believe that the Wellses of today can rely on Facebook. We need a tax-dollars-funded, just-for-journalism's-sake, public commitment to public media. Otherwise, we risk allowing the commontruth to become the onlytruth we hear.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License

FRIENDS: Help Us Fight

Independent journalism has become the last firewall against government and corporate lies. Yet, with frightening regularity, independent media sources are losing funding, closing down or being blacked out by Google and Facebook. Never before has independent media been more endangered. If you believe in Common Dreams, if you believe in people-powered independent media, please support us now and help us fight—with truths—against the lies that would smother our democracy. Please help keep Common Dreams alive and growing. Thank you. -- Craig Brown, Co-founder

Laura Flanders is a best-selling author and broadcaster who hosts the The Laura Flanders Show, where she interviews forward thinking people about the key questions of our time. The LF Show airs weekly on KCET/LinkTV, FreeSpeech TV, and in English & Spanish in teleSUR. Flanders is also a contributing writer to The Nation and Yes! Magazine (“Commonomics”) and a regular guest on MSNBC. She is the author of six books, including The New York Times best-seller, BUSHWOMEN: Tales of a Cynical Species (Verso, 2004) and Blue GRIT: True Democrats Take Back Politics from the Politicians (Penguin Press, 2007). The Laura Flanders Show first aired on Air America Radio 2004-2008. You can find all her archives and more at Lauraflanders.com or via Twitter @GRITlaura

Order stickers here...

Further

While waiting alongside other administration officials and lawmakers before a scheduled event at the White House on Thursday morning, a live video stream captured what appeared to be billionaire capitalist and U.S. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross scraping something from the corner of his eye and then putting it in his mouth. Seemed like an eye booger, but impossible to know for sure. Pretty sure U.S. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross just ate an eye booger on national television. No big deal, but...

Common Dreams brings you the news that matters.

Sign up for Newsletter

Connect With Us

Support Our Spring Fundraising Drive

Can We Count on Your Help Today?

Common Dreams is a small nonprofit with a big mission. Every day of the week, we publish the most important breaking news & views for the progressive community. To remain an independent news source, we do not advertise, sell subscriptions or accept corporate contributions. Instead, we rely on readers like you, to provide the "people power" that fuels our work. Please help keep Common Dreams alive by making a contribution to our Spring fundraising drive. Thank you. - Craig Brown, Co-founder